SPOTLIGHT

The Greatest Story Ever Ignored

Years of Living Dangerously executive producers James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub (with his golden retriever, Bet), David Gelber, Joel Bach, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with images of devastation and destruction from their new Showtime series, about climate change, photographed at MBS Media Campus, in Manhattan Beach, California.

When 60 Minutes veterans David Gelber and Joel Bach set out to produce a documentary on climate change, they knew they needed A-list talent. They just didn’t know how to get it. Then Bach remembered a college friend who had an uncle. Two weeks later the phone rang: “Hey, it’s Jerry Weintraub. How can I help you?” Weintraub (onetime head of United Artists, and producer of Nashville, Diner, and Ocean’s Eleven) and James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) signed on as executive producers. Doors began to open, and in came Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, Harrison Ford, and others. Topflight journalists joined the project, among them Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, and Lesley Stahl, of 60 Minutes.

Years of Living Dangerously weaves together several strands of storytelling, *Homeland-*style—for instance, the increasingly savage wildfires in the American West; rising sea levels in Bangladesh; competition for water in the Middle East. Gelber and Bach had originally conceived their project as a movie. Weintraub had a better idea. “You guys are idiots,” he told them. “You think you’re going to get people to go to the theater to watch this? You want eyeballs? Do a TV series.” David Nevins, at Showtime, gave the idea a quick thumbs-up. It will air starting this month.

“I watched all three presidential debates in 2012,” says Gelber, “waiting for a journalist to ask just one question about global warming. It never happened. What story is as big as climate change? Other than nuclear war, I can’t think of one.”